🍽️ Enping Laifen

Thick rice noodles in pork bone broth.

Enping Laifen is a traditional rice noodle of Enping, an overseas-Chinese hometown in Jiangmen with many emigrants abroad. The noodles are made by pressing rice milk through a sieve into boiling water, making them thicker and rounder than ordinary rice noodles, with a soft, slippery yet chewy bite. They are served in a rich pork-bone broth topped with mushrooms, dried shrimp, roasted pork and peanuts: the soup is fresh and the noodles smooth, deeply warming. With so many Enping people living overseas, laifen is the dish they must eat upon returning home and a regular at family reunion feasts. A bowl is generously topped, giving both the freshness of the broth and the slip of the noodles. It is common at morning-tea houses and street shops across the Wuyi region of Jiangmen and is a small mirror of the overseas-Chinese hometown food culture.